II. Josiah Wedgwood and Factory Discipline

Abstract

It is a text-book commonplace that Josiah Wedgwood was amongst the pioneers of English factory organization—the discipline of workers, the division of labour, and the systematization of production—but his work in these fields has never been examined in detail. Sixty thousand Wedgwood manuscripts, organized on a geographical basis for the sake of modern area advertisement rather than for the convenience of the historian, perhaps explain this neglect. The papers have not been ignored, but they have been sifted rather than studied in detail. Certain generalizations have emerged from this hit-or-miss investigation. In the articles of three visiting North American historians, Hower, Bladen and Schofield, and in the work of Thomas (essentially concerned with the history of the whole of the Potteries), the embryonic and incomplete skeleton of Wedgwood's methods has been laid bare, but much of the flesh has been discarded in the process.